Wednesday, January 20, 2010

OK, so, the Democrats are now down to...one more vote than they had when they passed the stimulus (albeit with Specter, who has not been replaced on the GOP side, as far as we know). Liberal bloggers urging Dems not to panic are exactly correct, but at the same time there seems to be a lot of fatalism among liberals that, well, Democrats always panic in these sort of situations.

That's not true. Democrats did not panic, for example, over the train wreck in the winter of 1995-1996. Democrats did not panic over impeachment in 1998. Indeed, Democrats did not panic this year when Obama's ratings fell in the spring, or over the August crazy, or after the VA and NJ elections in November. Individual Democrats said some things (in all of these cases) that were off-script. But overall, Democratic elected officials did not panic. The sense some Dems have that their party is a bunch of 'fraidy-cats is mostly, if not entirely, a myth.

Odds are they won't this time, either. Sure, they'll flail around for a few days, but before long they'll realize that flip-flopping isn't going to get them anywhere, and they'll pass around this fun graph by Joshua Tucker, and they'll realize that even if they want to meet Republicans halfway on everything that it isn't an available strategy.

In other words, not only is it good advice for Democrats not to panic, but it's also good advice to Democrats not to panic about the possibility that Democrats will panic.

Well, yes -- they shouldn't take much more away than that it's just one seat, but the fact of the one seat does, some cases, change what they should do (not because they've been rejected by the voters, but because they don't have 60).